VC What is the career ladder for you, Stephanie? Do you intend to become a journalist, an economist or…

SFBecome a journalist! [Laughs. ] I've had a strange career in the sense that I was always a specialist: I was always an economist. And when I started in journalism I was writing leaders for the Financial Times, so I was always on the economist side of the spectrum. Then I spent some time working in government in America. I guess that makes me a very nerdy kind of journalist. But Evan [Davis] is quite a nerd as well, and he seems to do a very good job on the Today programme.

VC Well, you've somehow managed to escape from nerdishness. In fact, during the credit crunch you were described as the "credit crunch crumpet". I just wondered whether you liked that description? Whether it offended your feminism?

SF [Laughs.] What is it they always say: you should compliment clever women on their looks and pretty women on their intelligence? I thought it was great fun.

VC Good, well, that's a nice answer. You've seen the American treasury operation, and you've seen the British operation. What do you think we could learn from the Americans?

SF I think treasuries around the world – and certainly the American and the British – have a certain arrogance in common. They feel that they're first among equals among other departments. But I was surprised when I got to the US treasury how impotent it is relative to the treasury here. You have a budget that you basically write at the beginning of the year and you send it to Congress, and everyone politely reads it and then does something completely different, which takes nine months to negotiate. So I think, in many ways, the US treasury is so much less powerful.

VC Moving on to the crisis, why did you, me, the rest of us, not warn of this in advance?

SF What I've found fascinating is that if you had asked anybody working in any of the individual areas – whether it's credit derivatives or the property market in Florida – what could go wrong, they would pretty much have described what has happened in their area. But no one thought, "Well, OK, what if all of these things happened simultaneously?" It was a failure to put the pieces together, which could be levelled at everyone: regulators, governments, bankers.

VC Where do you think we are now?

SF I think we've dodged the bullet, or whatever metaphor you want to use. You know, governments have thrown everything they have at this, and thank goodness it seems to be working. But there's a very messy aftermath to clean up. And when you think about how we're going to deal with the incredible level of debt that's built up around the world, some of those challenges, I think, are just as hard, or even harder, than managing the crisis.

VC How can the British economy boom in these conditions?

SF There's a global and a national problem for the next couple of years, which is that it's very hard to see where the demand is going to come from. The government is planning to withdraw government support of the economy starting next year, relative to this year, and it's hard to see where the big private demand's coming from. It does feel like we're into a period, globally, of really sub-par growth for a few years. Which makes it even harder to get a grip on rising debt levels. It could well be that debt could carry on rising at a time when it really ought to be falling.

VC Well, maybe that's the note on which to finish. Are there any things I should have asked you that I didn't?